Don’t let them off the hook in November. “Democratic rhetoric is become ever more desperate and overheated as we approach the November midterm elections. Last week, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that GOP positions on immigration were motivated by racism. She was followed by Representative Steve Israel, the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, who said, “To a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements animated by racism.” Even some leftists, such as Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, have rebuked the excess of these attacks. Referring to Democrats’ use of the “equal pay” issue to buttress claims that Republicans are waging “a war on women,” Marcus wrote, ‘The level of hyperbole — actually of demagoguery — that Democrats have engaged in here is revolting.’” The Increasing Desperation of Democrats: Slanders and lies may be part of a deliberate strategy to drive up turnout in November.

The Democrat panic is real. “Get it? The country is getting older. The older folks are more conservative, and they vote more often, especially in off-year elections. They are also better informed, watch more cable news and listen to more talk radio than younger people. This is why Democrats are panicked about the fall elections. This is why they should be panicked. Older voters know exactly what is going on with their heath care. They know exactly what has happened to their premiums and the availability of their doctors. They also know that President Obama could appear in the Rose Garden a hundred times proclaiming victory for Obamacare and it won’t change a thing about the impact on their lives. They know about the manipulations to try and postpone the very worst of what is coming their way, and they know — because they read the fine print — that the president is fudging every number in an attempt to deceive them.” Older voters aren’t fooled by Obamacare hype

Can our upside down world be up righted? “So Mr. Bundy must realize that in about 1990 we decided to focus on the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen and to ignore the felony of the lawbreaker. The former gave law enforcement respect; the latter ignored their authority. The first made or at least did not cost enforcers money; arresting the second began a money-losing odyssey of incarceration, trials, lawyers, appeals, and all the rest. Mr. Bundy knows that the bullies of the BLM would much rather send a SWAT team after him than after 50 illegal aliens being smuggled by a gun-toting cartel across the southwestern desert.” Cliven Bundy and The Rural Way

George W. Bush

Transparency. “President George W. Bush, whose White House was legendary for its secrecy, seems to have turned over a new leaf in his post-presidency. A previously undisclosed directive Bush signed almost two years after leaving office could result in many of his official records becoming public faster than those of his predecessor, President Bill Clinton, experts say — a move that’s drawing praise from unlikely quarters.” George W. Bush surprises on White House records

Keystone Pipeline

Politics. “Like the numerous delays of implementation of many of the provisions of ObamaCare, the delay in the final decision on Keystone is blatantly political. By putting it off until after this year’s midterm elections, the president is hoping to both assuage left-wing donors who are essential to his party’s waning hopes of holding on to the Senate and to allow vulnerable red-state Democrats to avoid blame for a decision that would hurt the economy and the cause of energy independence. But though this seems like an astute compromise that will allow the president to play both ends against the middle, it is a case of the administration being too clever by half. Far from helping the cause of Democrats like Alaska’s Mark Begich, Colorado’s Mark Udall, and Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, the Keystone delay has handed Republicans an issue with which they can batter these incumbents. Though liberals like Obama have sought to demonize GOP donors like the Koch brothers for trying to buy votes to advance their libertarian agenda, the Keystone decision is nothing less than a $100 million payoff to Steyer.” Dems May Regret Steyer’s Keystone Payoff

Keep spinning. “Appearing on Meet the Press yesterday, DNC chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz claimed that Republicans are nominating “extremists,” and that there were no politics involved in President Obama’s decision to delay the Keystone Pipeline.” Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s delusional ranting continues

As always, follow the money. “Billionaire hedge fund operator and “green” energy magnate Tom Steyer has pledged $100 million in the 2014 election cycle to help Democratic candidates who oppose the Keystone pipeline and who favor “green” energy over fossil fuels. Steyer claims to be a man of principle who has no financial interest in the causes he supports, but acts only for the public good. That is a ridiculous claim: Steyer is the ultimate rent-seeker who depends on government connections to produce subsidies and mandates that make his “green” energy investments profitable. [Snip] But Steyer’s hypocrisy goes still deeper. Today, he is a bitter opponent of fossil fuels, especially coal. That fits with his current economic interests: banning coal-fired power plants will boost the value of his solar projects. But it was not always thus. In fact, Steyer owes his fortune in large part to the fact that he has been one of the world’s largest financers of coal projects. Tom Steyer was for coal before he was against it.” THE EPIC HYPOCRISY OF TOM STEYER

Marxism being repackaged and reborn and their celebrating in Washington. “Piketty is the author of a big new book on economic inequality. Liberals have the fever and Piketty has the cure. In case you haven’t guessed, it has something to do with turning the dial on income and wealth taxes to 11. [Snip} As I get it, by Piketty’s lights, the world wars of the twentieth century had a previously undiscovered virtue. They had the virtue of retarding the growth of economic inequality. What the world wars did incidentally, Piketty now seeks to do intentionally through tax policy, and the man has met the moment. I’m afraid attention must be paid.” MARXIST BLUES AGAIN

Mainstream Media

Don’t ever trust the liberal, mainstream media. “Well, well, well. So the Soros-funded group works with mainstream media journalists on stories, according to Attkisson, describing her own personal experience. That’s wielding a lot more influence than merely blogging about the news, it is getting the left wing camel’s nose under the media tent, so to speak.” Sharyl Attkisson charges Media Matters helps produce news reports for CBS

The truth must not be told. “SHARYL ATTKISSON: I do think, again, that’s a campaign by those who really want to controversialize the reporting I do so that you won’t listen to it, because if anybody took a few minutes really to do a Google search, you would see the dozens and dozens of stories I’ve done that were, in many cases, complemented by liberal press and other liberals as being a really good story, and I have been criticized by the conservative side in the past. So, I think it wouldn’t take much for someone –.” Sharyl Attkisson: Media Matters May Have Been Paid To Attack Me

Michelle Obama

The people are on to her. “This first lady has been the weakest and most trivial in a half-century, no substance, and not even any flash — a Shelly O, maybe, but no Jackie O. One reason: She’s not all that likeable. She polls OK, but c’mon, who’d want to hang out with her? She just doesn’t seem fun, often has on that “I’m-Not-Amused” face. Something about her makes you think: Boy, she’s angry about something.” CURL: Shelly O — The first lady comes in last

The Middle Class

More on a story from yesterday.Hunger Games looking more and more realistic. And just wait for when our government overlords on both sides of the aisle cram Amnesty down our throats… Think things are bad now? We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. “America’s big cities are moving in the direction of third world demographics. A smallish upper class lives comfortably, even glamorously, accompanied by a much larger underclass, the more energetic of whom serve the upper class as waiters, housekeepers, taxi drivers, and other service occupations. The less energetic turn to welfare (not a feature of third world countries, to be sure) or crime (rampant in some third world countries like Brazil, less common in others, such as Egypt). Needless to say, the Democratic Party, which controls all major American cities, thrives on this demographic trend. Two articles, pone from a leftist, the other from a conservative perspective, analyze the political; and economic forces powering the transformation of two cities.” The vanishing urban middle class

If we continue down this path, the middle class will no longer exist. “I, like most members of the middle class, particularly in California, just paid a tax bill that seemed less like my fair share than a shakedown by the Mafia. Increasingly, for people who run small businesses or earn a decent income, the tax bite is becoming ever more like in Europe, with total bills in high-tax states like ours reaching upward of 40 percent. It’s like paying the bill for a big dinner without eating the food – we get hammered like Swedes but without the free education, health care and other benefits of a more conventional welfare state. Most galling is that, while the middle class has endured ever-higher taxes, those who have benefited most from the Bernanke-Obama “recovery” continue to get the biggest tax breaks. This is largely the investor class, who have been able to reap the benefits of the stock-market boom and, in some areas, including coastal California, the steep rise in real estate prices.” JOEL KOTKIN: Stop favoring investors, speculators over middle class.

Obamacare

Click on over to read the story. “Americans are bracing for massive health-care cost increases next year. Stories about the hardships faced by many individuals and companies as a result of ObamaCare have been cited by the law’s critics. But the president has denounced them, and other Democratic apologists such as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid have claimed they are falsehoods or outright inventions cooked up by the Koch brothers and other conservatives. The truth, however, is not hard to discover. After reading the piece I wrote last week about the president’s claims, one Connecticut businessman (who wishes to remain anonymous) whom I know wrote to me to tell the story of his company’s experience with the law and the way his representatives in Washington had responded to his complaints. Here is his story.” ObamaCare Horror Stories Aren’t Lies

November is coming. Let’s make the Democrats pay the price for what they’ve done. “The downturn in health care costs in recent years can almost completely be attributed to the Obama economy – less money in people’s pockets means less spending on doctor visits and drugs. But one wonders if the decrease was the result of Obamacare putting pressure on the “cost curve,” why not blame the increase on Obamacare too? This would be logical, but Obamacare supporters have decided to play dumb and claim not to know why health care costs are rising the fastest since 2004. We know what’s changed between 2013 and 2014. Getting Obamacare supporters to admit it is the real challenge.” Health care spending on the rise

We can’t wait for November. “What all of this means is that the president’s claim of 8 million enrollees is not something to be dismissed or ignored. But the claim’s incomplete and a bit like saying a baseball score is eight. Eight runs in a major league baseball game is a good thing, but you can’t really evaluate it unless you know how many runs the other team scored. And, for the president’s health care law, the negatives are still piling up a lot faster than the positives.” Don’t Believe the Spin, Obamacare Is Still a Loser

Supreme Court

“It’s interesting that Stevens, who still has the energy to unburden himself in public on what his former colleague should do, denies that politics played a role in his own retirement. If his health was so bad, why is he out shooting his mouth off? And why is a man who swore to uphold the Constitution saying that we shoudl rewrite the Second Amendment to limit firearms ownership to people in formal militias? It is even more interesting that he thinks politics, not the law or scholarship, is the business of the Supreme Court. In fact, it offers ammunition for people like me who think the Court has taken far too large a role in our political life.” Retired Justice Stevens lets the cat out of the bag on politicized Supreme Court

We’ve got a terrific line up for our annual Christmas program. First up will be the Ignite Barbershop Quartet. Ignite began singing together after a quartet matching party in November 2015. They are all Champion members of Region 21’s Scottsdale Chorus and they will be singing for us!

After lunch, Congressional District 6 congressman, Representative David Schweikart, will talk to us about what’s happening in Washington DC, and provide us with a status of the Tax Bill working its way through the House of Representatives and Senate.

Finally, member Julia Graham will install our new 2018/2019 officers. We look forward to seeing you and be sure to bring a friend or two or three!